Dreaming in Cuban (15 page)

The postcard was of a tobacco factory, row after row of women bunching bronze leaves into cigars. The caption on the back said “
Cuba … alegre como su sol
.” Papi wrote that he’d returned from his travels and was settled in a hotel on the wharf. He said he very much wanted to see us and called us his “two precious beans.” He said he had never forgotten us.

Milagro and I took out our crane scarves and flew around our
room, watching the birds flutter in the air behind us. We folded and refolded our clothes and waited for escape.

A few days later, Mamá was leaving for one of her overnight voodoo meetings. Milagro and I persuaded her to let us stay by ourselves in Havana instead of going to Abuela Celia’s house. After she left, Milagro and I packed our clothes in a duffel bag and looped the crane scarves around our necks. We waited for a taxi by the plaza, and didn’t look back.

The moon was already high in the sky, impatient for night to fall. It seemed to draw light from the waning sun. We drove up one alley and then another, bouncing on the cobblestones and the taxi’s creaking springs. The waiting seemed longer than all the waiting before it. Would we be able to escape?

When we stopped, I looked up at the decayed hotel, I looked up at our future.

Milagro seemed to know where to go so I followed her through the wrought-iron archway and up the steep, curved stairs reeking with filth. The banister wobbled in place as we climbed one flight, then another.

“He’s in there.” Milagro pointed to a wooden door with no number. She strode up to it as if she were coming to collect the rent and knocked hard, twice.

Our father’s face was hung with slack ugly folds that dragged down his eyes until the rims showed red, that dragged down the stump of his nose and his misshapen ears, dragged them down until his skull was taut and bare. And before we could scream or run away, Papi stretched out his arms, his once-beautiful hands, and called our names.

Milagro and I continued to see our father in secret whenever we could. If Mamá had found out, who knows what she would have done. Our father’s room, formerly a servant’s, had a single window that looked out over an alley where mongrels fought. At
night, Papi said, he could hear the moans of the ships leaving Havana. It made him feel alone.

After Mamá burned him, Papi said a captain in the merchant marines took pity on him and doctored his papers so they’d say he was injured during an explosion on board. Papi’s disability pension was meager so I don’t know how he afforded the gifts he gave us—huge dolls with creamy skin and velvety bows, plastic purses with cartoons on them, colorful barrettes for our hair, which we hid from our mother. It’s as if now that we’d grown, Papi wanted to turn back the clock. He wanted us smaller, younger, pocket-size. I think he may have bought the gifts long ago but wanted desperately for us still to like them, still to like him.

After a while, it wasn’t difficult for us to look at our father’s face. In his sagging eyes we found the language we’d been searching for, a language more eloquent than the cheap bead necklaces of words my mother offered.

We brought Papi mashed-up food and wiped clean the folds of his scarred flesh. I worked extra time in my school’s lemon groves and earned coupons for a cassette radio. Milagro bought him an
Irakere
jazz tape that he played over and over again. He didn’t say what he did when we weren’t there, but I suspect he never left his room.

“I was the fastest runner in high school,” he told us once. The past was as vivid to him as if he could live it over at will. He was his parents’ only son, born years after they’d stopped praying for a baby, and he was pampered and fussed over like a first grandchild. “I won the hundred-yard dash even though I was much heavier than the other boys. I made it to the finish in thirteen seconds.”

He told us, too, how he’d lasted only one morning in the nickel mines before joining the merchant marines. But when he returned from his first voyage to Africa, his parents had died.

One day, Papi asked to see Ivanito, I don’t know why. Milagro
and I warned him that Ivanito probably wouldn’t come, that all he’d heard were lies and more lies about him. Maybe we were jealous. We wanted to keep Papi for ourselves.

But then we changed our minds. We wanted Ivanito to see what Mamá had done to our father, what she’d done to us.

There was a hurricane warning that day. The wind whipped up the garbage in the streets and the air was so wet that the buildings gleamed through it. Down by the harbor, the ocean was rough and high on the piers. No watermarks showed. The three of us ran with linked arms, clutching our jackets, and felt the first drops of rain as we reached Papi’s hotel.

“I don’t think he’s home.” Milagro looked at me strangely but neither of us knew why. Ivanito began jumping nervously in place, jumping brisk little jumps like he was trying to stay warm.

If it hadn’t been for the rain that fell hard and sudden, we wouldn’t have gone up those stairs. If we hadn’t been afraid of the dogs fighting in the alley, we might have taken Ivanito away. If we hadn’t seen the ships, big ones with curled Russian lettering, moored to the docks like Gullivers, we might have come back another day. But we didn’t.

My father’s door was slightly open and we heard a low grunting, like newborn pigs suckling their mother’s teats. Ivanito pushed open the door and we saw my father, his face terrible and swollen and purple as his sex, open his mouth wide and shudder as his milk sputtered on the breasts of the masked naked woman below him.

We’re back at boarding school now. We like it here. Milagro and I volunteer to feed the horses in the stables, and then we ride them through the woods and the lemon groves, the horses all buckteeth and happy.

Ivanito is at boarding school, too. His teachers say he’s very intelligent but maladjusted, that he cries every night and disturbs
the other boys’ sleep. Ivanito feels guilty about visiting Papi. He fears that Mamá may find out and then he’ll never be able to go home. But we tell him that nobody but us knows what happened, and swore him to lifelong secrecy. The three of us pricked our fingers and mingled our blood to make certain.

What my brother doesn’t realize yet is that nothing Mamá does has anything to do with him, or with Abuela Celia, or with any of us.

(1975)

L
ourdes Puente is walking her beat. It’s a five-block square of Brooklyn with brownstones and linden trees, considered safe as neighborhoods go on this side of Atlantic Avenue. Lourdes is an auxiliary policewoman, the first in her precinct. She scored one hundred on her written test by answering “c” to the multiple-choice questions she wasn’t sure of or didn’t understand. Captain Cacciola congratulated her personally. He wanted to make sure she was tough enough on crime. Lourdes said she believed drug dealers should die in the electric chair. This pleased the captain, and she was sent on patrol Tuesday and Thursday nights between seven and ten.

Lourdes enjoys patrolling the streets in her thick-soled black shoes. These shoes, it seems to her, are a kind of equalizer. She can run in them if she has to, jump curbs, traverse the buckled, faulted sidewalks of Brooklyn without twisting an ankle. These shoes are power. If women wore shoes like these, she thinks, they wouldn’t worry so much about more abstract equalities.
They would join the army reserve or the auxiliary police like her, and protect what was theirs. In Cuba nobody was prepared for the Communists and look what happened. Now her mother guards their beach with binoculars and a pistol against Yankees. If only Lourdes had had a gun when she needed it.

It’s Thursday, just after nine. There’s a full moon out. It hangs fat and waxy in the sky, creased with shadows.

“Every loony in New York comes out of the woodwork on nights like this,” the regular beat cop had warned her.

But so far everything’s been quiet. It’s too cold for loiterers. Lourdes suddenly remembers how her daughter had ridiculed Armstrong’s first words on the moon. “He had months to think up something and that’s all he could say?” Pilar was only ten years old and already mocking everything. Lourdes slapped her for being disrespectful, but it made no difference to her daughter. Pilar was immune to threats. She placed no value on normal things so it was impossible to punish her. Even now, Pilar is not afraid of pain or of losing anything. It’s this indifference that is most maddening.

The last of the Jews have moved out of the neighborhood. Only the Kellners are left. The others are on Long Island or in Westchester or Florida, depending on their ages and their bank accounts. Pilar thinks Lourdes is bigoted, but what does her daughter know of life? Equality is just another one of her abstractions. “I don’t make up the statistics,” she tells Pilar. “I don’t color the faces down at the precinct.” Black faces, Puerto Rican faces. Once in a while a stray Irish or Italian face looking scared. Lourdes prefers to confront reality—the brownstones converted to tenements in a matter of months, the garbage in the streets, the jaundice-eyed men staring vacantly from the stoops. Even Pilar couldn’t denounce her for being a hypocrite.

Lourdes feels the solid ground beneath her solid black shoes as she walks. She breathes in the wintry air, which stings her
lungs. It seems to her as if the air were made of crystal filaments, scraping and cleaning her inside. She decides she has no patience for dreamers, for people who live between black and white.

Lourdes slides her hand up and down her wooden nightstick. It’s the only weapon the police department will issue her. That and handcuffs. Lourdes has used the stick only once in her two months of patrolling, to break up a fight between a Puerto Rican kid and three Italians down at the playground. Lourdes knows the Puerto Rican’s mother. She’s the one who worked at the bakery for an afternoon. Lourdes caught her pocketing fifty cents from the sale of two crullers, and threw her out. No wonder her son is a delinquent. He sells plastic bags of marijuana behind the liquor store.

Lourdes’s son would have been about the same age as the Navarro boy.
Her
son would have been different. He wouldn’t have talked back to her or taken drugs or drunk beer from paper bags like the other teenagers.
Her
son would have helped her in the bakery without complaint. He would have come to her for guidance, pressed her hand to his cheek, told her he loved her. Lourdes would have talked to her son the way Rufino talks to Pilar, for companionship. Lourdes suffers with this knowledge.

Down the street, the trees are imprisoned equidistantly in square plots of dirt. Everything else is concrete. Lourdes remembers reading somewhere about how Dutch elm disease wiped out the entire species on the East Coast except for a lone tree in Manhattan surrounded by concrete. Is this, she wonders, how we’ll all survive?

It became clear to Lourdes shortly after she and Rufino moved to New York that he would never adapt. Something came unhinged in his brain that would make him incapable of working in a conventional way. There was a part of him that could never leave the
finca
or the comfort of its cycles, and this diminished him for any other life. He could not be transplanted. So Lourdes
got a job. Cuban women of a certain age and a certain class consider working outside the home to be beneath them. But Lourdes never believed that.

While it was true that she had grown accustomed to the privileges that came with marrying into the Puente family, Lourdes never accepted the life designated for its women. Even now, stripped of their opulence, crowded into two-bedroom apartments in Hialeah and Little Havana, the Puente women clung to their rituals as they did their engraved silverware, succumbing to a cloying nostalgia. Doña Zaida, once a formidable matriarch who ruled her eight sons by a resolute jealousy, spent long afternoons watching
novelas
on television and perfuming her thickening wrists.

Lourdes knew she could never be this kind of woman. After her honeymoon, she got right to work on the Puente ranch. She reviewed the ledgers, fired the cheating accountant, and took over the books herself. She redecorated the musty, coffer-ceilinged mansion with watercolor landscapes, reupholstered the sofas with rustic fabrics, and discarded the cretonne drapes in favor of sliding glass doors that invited the morning light. Out went the ornate bric-a-brac, the austere furniture carved with the family crest. Lourdes refilled the mosaic-lined fountain with sweet water and built an aviary in the garden, stocking it with toucans and cockatoos, parrots, a macaw, and canaries that sang in high octaves. Sometimes at night, she could hear the cries of the quail doves and solitaires interspersed with the songs from the aviary.

When a disgruntled servant informed Doña Zaida about the changes in her country house, she descended on the ranch in a fury and restored the villa to its former state. Lourdes, who defiantly rebuilt the aviary and restocked it with birds, never spoke to her mother-in-law again.

*

Lourdes misses the birds she had in Cuba. She thinks of joining a bird-watching society, but who would take care of the bakery in her absence? Pilar is unreliable and Rufino can’t tell a Danish from a donut. It’s a shame, too, because all Lourdes ever sees in Brooklyn is dull little wrens or those filthy pigeons. Rufino has taken to raising pigeons in wire-mesh cages in their backyard the way he saw Marlon Brando do in
On the Waterfront.
He prints messages on bits of paper, slips them through metal rings on the pigeons’ legs, then kisses each bird on the head for good luck and lets it loose with a whoop. Lourdes doesn’t know or care what her husband is writing, or to whom. By now, she accepts him the way she accepts the weather. What else can she do?

Rufino has stopped confiding in her. She hears secondhand snippets about his projects from Pilar, and knows he’s trying to develop a super carburetor, one that will get two hundred miles to the gallon. Lourdes knows, too, that her husband is still brooding about artificial intelligence. She is not sure what this means although Rufino explained to her once that it would do for the brain what the telephone did for the human voice, take it farther and faster than it could go unassisted. Lourdes cannot understand why this is so difficult. She remembers seeing robots at the World’s Fair ten years ago. She and Rufino and Pilar ate in a restaurant observatory shaped like a spaceship. The food was terrible. The view was of Queens.